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A Financial Times Best Book of the YearA Guardian Best Architecture Book of the Year“Sharp, revealing, funny.”—The Guardian“An original and even occasionally hilarious book about losing ideals and finding them again… [De Graaf] deftly shows that architecture cannot be better or more pure than the flawed humans who make it.”—The EconomistArchitecture, we like to believe, is an elevated art form that shapes the world as it pleases. Four Walls and a Roof turns this fiction on its head, offering a candid account of what it’s really like to work as an architect. Drawing on his own tragicomic experiences in the field, Reinier de Graaf reveals the world of contemporary architecture in vivid snapshots: from the corridors of wealth in London, Moscow, and Dubai to the demolished hopes of postwar social housing in New York and St. Louis. We meet ambitious oligarchs, developers for whom architecture is nothing more than an investment, and layers of bureaucrats, consultants, and mysterious hangers-on who lie between any architect’s idea and the chance of its execution.“This is a book about power, money and influence, and architecture’s complete lack of any of them… Witty, insightful and funny, it is a (sometimes painful) dissection of a profession that thinks it is still in control.”—Financial Times“This is the most stimulating book on architecture and its practice that I have read for years.”—Architects’ Journal

An intellectual biography of Eric Hobsbawm, one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) was one of the foremost European intellectuals of the twentieth century. He published hundreds of articles on modern history and culture, and his books became canonical works and bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. His crystal-clear writing, vast erudition, and ability to make his Marxist analysis digestible to a wide audience brought him worldwide renown.Yet Hobsbawm was no academic hermit. Through his globetrotting journalism, he was embedded in an extraordinary web of politicians, activists, and fellow intellectuals across Europe, South Asia, and the Americas, including Manmohan Singh, Che Guevara, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Fernand Braudel, E. P. Thompson, Arno Mayer, and Salvador Allende. Emile Chabal traces the origins of Hobsbawm’s ideas and most famous writings by exploring his scholarly foundations, delving deep into the archives to uncover hidden links and unexpected conversations that shaped his pathbreaking work.Going well beyond the Ages series of modern history books for which Hobsbawm is best known, Chabal offers the first substantial interpretation of Hobsbawm’s entire body of writing. Indeed, The Age of Hobsbawm is also a trove of unique insights into the generations of Marxist writers with whom Hobsbawm was in conversation—authors whose work continues to shape political debates globally.

A Short History of European Law brings to life 2,500 years of legal history, tying current norms to the circumstances of their conception. Tamar Herzog describes how successive legal systems built upon one another, from ancient times through the European Union. Roman law formed the backbone of each configuration, though the way it was used and reshaped varied dramatically from one century and place to the next. Only by considering Continental civil law and English common law together do we see how they drew from and enriched this shared tradition.“A remarkable achievement, sure to become a go-to text for scholars and students alike… A must-read for anyone eager to understand the origins of core legal concepts and institution—like due process and rule of law—that profoundly shape the societies in which we live today.”—Amalia D. Kessler, Stanford University“A fundamental and timely contribution to the understanding of Europe as seen through its legal systems. Herzog masterfully shows the profound unity of legal thinking and practices across the Continent and in England.”—Federico Varese, Oxford University“Required reading for Americanists North and South, and indeed, for all of us inhabiting a postcolonial world deeply marked by the millennia of legal imaginings whose dynamic transformations it so lucidly charts.”—David Nirenberg, University of Chicago

To most of us, learning something "the hard way" implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head. Drawing on recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners.Memory plays a central role in our ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as applying knowledge to problems never before encountered and drawing inferences from facts already known. New insights into how memory is encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved have led to a better understanding of how we learn. Grappling with the impediments that make learning challenging leads both to more complex mastery and better retention of what was learned.Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. More complex and durable learning come from self-testing, introducing certain difficulties in practice, waiting to re-study new material until a little forgetting has set in, and interleaving the practice of one skill or topic with another. Speaking most urgently to students, teachers, trainers, and athletes, Make It Stick will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.

“Now, for the first time, we can read the version that Wilde intended…Both the text and Nicholas Frankel’s introduction make for fascinating reading.” —Paris Review More than 120 years after Oscar Wilde submitted The Picture of Dorian Gray for publication in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, the uncensored version of his novel appears here for the first time in a paperback edition. This volume restores all of the material removed by the book’s first editor. Upon receipt of the typescript, Wilde’s editor panicked at what he saw. Contained within its pages was material he feared readers would find “offensive”—especially instances of explicit homosexual content. He proceeded to go through the typescript with his pencil, cleaning it up until he made it “acceptable to the most fastidious taste.” Wilde did not see these changes until his novel appeared in print. Wilde’s editor’s concern was well placed. Even in its redacted form, the novel caused public outcry. The British press condemned it as “vulgar,” “unclean,” “poisonous,” “discreditable,” and “a sham.” When Wilde later enlarged the novel for publication in book form, he responded to his critics by further toning down its “immoral” elements.Wilde famously said that The Picture of Dorian Gray “contains much of me”: Basil Hallward is “what I think I am,” Lord Henry “what the world thinks me,” and “Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.” Wilde’s comment suggests a backward glance to a Greek or Dorian Age, but also a forward-looking view to a more permissive time than his own repressive Victorian era. By implication, Wilde would have preferred we read the uncensored version of his novel today.

The Earth has entered a new age—the Anthropocene—in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. Since the mid-twentieth century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. The Great Acceleration explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of energy systems, as well as trends in climate change, urbanization, and environmentalism.More than any other factor, human dependence on fossil fuels inaugurated the Anthropocene. Before 1700, people used little in the way of fossil fuels, but over the next two hundred years coal became the most important energy source. When oil entered the picture, coal and oil soon accounted for seventy-five percent of human energy use. This allowed far more economic activity and produced a higher standard of living than people had ever known—but it created far more ecological disruption.We are now living in the Anthropocene. The period from 1945 to the present represents the most anomalous period in the history of humanity’s relationship with the biosphere. Three-quarters of the carbon dioxide humans have contributed to the atmosphere has accumulated since World War II ended, and the number of people on Earth has nearly tripled. So far, humans have dramatically altered the planet’s biogeochemical systems without consciously managing them. If we try to control these systems through geoengineering, we will inaugurate another stage of the Anthropocene. Where it might lead, no one can say for sure.

The workings of Western intelligence in our day--whether in politics or the arts, in the humanities or the church--are as troubling as they are mysterious, leading to the questions: Where are we going? What in the world were we thinking? By exploring the history of four "cultures" so deeply embedded in Western history that we rarely see their instrumental role in politics, religion, education, and the arts, this timely book provides a broad framework for addressing these questions in a fresh way.The cultures considered here originated in the ancient world, took on Christian forms, and manifest themselves today in more secular ways. These are, as John W. O'Malley identifies them: the prophetic culture that proclaims the need for radical change in the structures of society (represented by, for example, Jeremiah, Martin Luther, and Martin Luther King, Jr.); the academic culture that seeks instead to understand those structures (Aristotle, Aquinas, the modern university); the humanistic culture that addresses fundamental human issues and works for the common good of society (Cicero, Erasmus, and Eleanor Roosevelt); and the culture of art and performance that celebrates the mystery of the human condition (Phidias, Michelangelo, Balanchine).By showing how these cultures, as modes of activity and discourse in which Western intelligence has manifested itself through the centuries and continues to do so, O'Malley produces an essay that especially through the history of Christianity brilliantly illuminates the larger history of the West.

One of the New Yorker's "Best Books of 2026 So Far"How the rise of Wall Street in the 1980s lured a generation of young upstarts to New York, unleashing a political and cultural transformation whose national repercussions are still felt today.Yuppies may have been a classic 1980s stereotype, but they were also a very real demographic: a wave of hundreds of thousands of highly educated young professionals that washed over New York during that decade. As Wall Street moved to the center of American life, it drew a generation of young people into its vortex. For the first time, banks recruited roughly one-third of graduating classes from top universities.America’s economy had a new main character. Young bankers extracted profits from waning industries, shattering the foundations on which stable middle-class employment had long rested. Yuppie lawyers devised deals and tax strategies that eroded workers’ power and wages. As consumers, yuppies created new cultures of fitness and of excess, popularizing marathon running and fine dining as status markers. As city-dwellers, they were pioneers of gentrification. And as voters and political donors, yuppies engineered a takeover of local and national government, using their wealth to back candidates who would remake the country in their image.Yuppies reminds us that we still live in the shadow of the greed-is-good 1980s: Our cities are playgrounds for the wealthy, and Wall Street and Washington remain locked in a tight embrace. Dylan Gottlieb’s exquisite recounting leaves no doubt that the yuppie takeover of New York began a more unequal chapter in American life—one we continue writing today.

From philosophers Avishai Margalit and Assaf Sharon, an erudite yet approachable inquiry into political manipulation and the grave threat it poses to human freedom today.Manipulation is as old as history itself, yet Aldous Huxley’s paraphrase of Churchill rings truer than ever: “never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.” Manipulation presents a clear danger to liberal democracy today. Demagogues undermine civic discussion, and propagandists and conspiracy theorists create cognitive traps that erode critical thinking.What exactly is manipulation, and what sets it apart from other forms of influence? How does it differ from convincing, attracting, or nudging? Drawing on examples from mythology, literature, history, and politics, philosophers Margalit and Sharon argue that manipulation is not just a form of deceit and intellectual harm; it is, above all, an exercise of power. Manipulation exploits mental weaknesses and vulnerabilities with the goal of establishing control. Whereas liberal philosophers overlook manipulation, instead treating coercion as the primary form of political domination, Margalit and Sharon argue that manipulation should be seen as coercion’s insidious counterpart in undermining human freedom.Public support is fundamental to the legitimacy of government. Today, political manipulation is corrupting the formation and expression of public opinion, making manipulation a driving force of the global crisis of democratic decline. A timely work, but also a work for all times, Captive Minds stands as the definitive study of a pervasive threat to political freedom and the increasingly fragile institutions that sustain it.

A foundational text of science and technology studies from the field’s most celebrated theorist.Science and technology have an immense impact on every aspect of society, but how exactly are scientific facts produced? In this lively and authoritative classic, Bruno Latour reveals that social context is as important as technical content when it comes to understanding how science works.Latour’s focus is not on what scientists say but on what they do, from the day-to-day practice of gathering data and writing technical papers to the travel and networking required to secure funding. Observing the scientific enterprise with the analytical distance of an ethnographer participating in a foreign culture, he argues that science is driven not by value-neutral discoveries of objective truths and natural laws but by the elaboration of longer and stronger networks encompassing both people and things. Only by mobilizing a wide range of human and nonhuman actors—fellow scientists, bureaucrats, specimens, instruments, calculation devices, texts, microbes—can “fact-builders” successfully accumulate the authority needed to convert a novel, tendentious claim into an accepted truth.Setting a pioneering agenda for the social studies of science, Science in Action marshals a wealth of vivid examples to challenge conventional disciplinary boundaries and introduce readers to the disorienting conceptual universe of actor-network theory. Playful, irreverent, and unremittingly provocative, it remains among Latour’s most significant works.

A New York Times Notable Book of the YearA Times Literary Supplement Book of the YearA Globe and Mail Best Book of the YearA Publishers Weekly Best Book of the YearA Tablet Best Book of the YearWinner of a Christianity Today Book Award“One finds big nuggets of insight, useful to almost anybody with an interest in the progress of human society.” —The EconomistWhat does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that we—in the West, at least—largely do. And clearly the place of religion in our societies has changed profoundly in the last few centuries. In what will be a defining book for our time, Charles Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean—of what, precisely, happens when a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God becomes one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is only one human possibility among others.Taylor, long one of our most insightful thinkers on such questions, offers a historical perspective. He examines the development in “Western Christendom” of those aspects of modernity which we call secular. What he describes is in fact not a single, continuous transformation, but a series of new departures, in which earlier forms of religious life have been dissolved or destabilized and new ones have been created. As we see here, today’s secular world is characterized not by an absence of religion—although in some societies religious belief and practice have markedly declined—but rather by the continuing multiplication of new options, religious, spiritual, and anti-religious, which individuals and groups seize on in order to make sense of their lives and give shape to their spiritual aspirations.What this means for the world—including the new forms of collective religious life it encourages, with their tendency to a mass mobilization that breeds violence—is what Charles Taylor grapples with, in a book as timely as it is timeless.

Religious beliefs and practices, which permeated all aspects of life in antiquity, traveled well-worn routes throughout the Mediterranean: itinerant charismatic practitioners journeying from place to place peddled their skills as healers, purifiers, cursers, and initiators; and vessels decorated with illustrations of myths traveled with them. New gods encountered in foreign lands by merchants and conquerors were sometimes taken home to be adapted and adopted. This collection of essays by a distinguished international group of scholars, drawn from the groundbreaking reference work Religions of the Ancient World, offers an expansive, comparative perspective on this complex spiritual world.

The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge.Unflattening is an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint. Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. While its vibrant, constantly morphing images occasionally serve as illustrations of text, they more often connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references throughout the book. They become allusions, allegories, and motifs, pitting realism against abstraction and making us aware that more meets the eye than is presented on the page.In its graphic innovations and restless shape-shifting, Unflattening is meant to counteract the type of narrow, rigid thinking that Sousanis calls “flatness.” Just as the two-dimensional inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott’s novella Flatland could not fathom the concept of “upwards,” Sousanis says, we are often unable to see past the boundaries of our current frame of mind. Fusing words and images to produce new forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we normally apprehend.

“Taylor has taken on the most delicate and exacting of philosophical questions, the question of who we are and how we should live…and he has made this an adventure of self-discovery for his reader.” —Martha Nussbaum, New RepublicIn this extensive inquiry into the sources of modern selfhood, Charles Taylor demonstrates just how rich and precious those resources are. The modern turn to subjectivity, with its attendant rejection of an objective order of reason, has led—it seems to many—to mere subjectivism at the mildest and to sheer nihilism at the worst. Many critics believe that the modern order has no moral backbone and has proved corrosive to all that might foster human good. Taylor rejects this view. He argues that, properly understood, our modern notion of the self provides a framework that more than compensates for the abandonment of substantive notions of rationality.The major insight of Sources of the Self is that modern subjectivity, in all its epistemological, aesthetic, and political ramifications, has its roots in ideas of human good. After first arguing that contemporary philosophers have ignored how self and good connect, the author defines the modern identity by describing its genesis. His effort to uncover and map our moral sources leads to novel interpretations of most of the figures and movements in the modern tradition. Taylor shows that the modern turn inward is not disastrous but is in fact the result of our long efforts to define and reach the good. At the heart of this definition he finds what he calls the affirmation of ordinary life, a value which has decisively if not completely replaced an older conception of reason as connected to a hierarchy based on birth and wealth. In telling the story of a revolution whose proponents have been Augustine, Montaigne, Luther, and a host of others, Taylor’s goal is in part to make sure we do not lose sight of their goal and endanger all that has been achieved. Sources of the Self provides a decisive defense of the modern order and a sharp rebuff to its critics.

A New Yorker Best Book of the Year“A probing critique of a modern public sphere that overwhelms the private realm . . . Pressly offers a unique vision of what can be gained by stepping back from the outside world, and the screens that try to possess us.” —John Kaag, The AtlanticA visionary reexamination of the value of privacy in today’s hypermediated world—not just as a political right but as the key to a life worth living.Today, almost nothing in our digital lives escapes surveillance. We are able to configure privacy settings on our devices and social media platforms, but we know our efforts pale in comparison to the scale of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic manipulation. Many now wonder whether it is still possible to live a private life, or whether privacy is even worth fighting for.The Right to Oblivion argues incisively and persuasively that we still can and should strive for privacy, though for different reasons than we might think. Debates about privacy often equate personal data breaches with violations of individual freedom. Yet, as Lowry Pressly argues, privacy isn’t simply a right to be protected, but a tool for making life meaningful.Privacy deepens our relationships with others as well as ourselves, reinforcing our capacities for agency, trust, play, self-discovery, and growth. Without privacy, the world would be shallow, lonely, and inhospitable. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Hannah Arendt, Jorge Luis Borges, and a range of contemporary artists, Pressly shows why we all need a refuge from the world: not a place to hide, but a psychic space beyond the confines of a digital world where the individual is treated as mere data.

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius are treasured today—as they have been over the centuries—as an inexhaustible source of wisdom. And as one of the three most important expressions of Stoicism, this is an essential text for everyone interested in ancient religion and philosophy. Yet the clarity and ease of the work’s style are deceptive. Pierre Hadot, eminent historian of ancient thought, uncovers new levels of meaning and expands our understanding of its underlying philosophy.Written by the Roman emperor for his own private guidance and self-admonition, the Meditations set forth principles for living a good and just life. Hadot probes Marcus Aurelius’s guidelines and convictions and discerns the hitherto unperceived conceptual system that grounds them. Abundantly quoting the Meditations to illustrate his analysis, the author allows Marcus Aurelius to speak directly to the reader. And Hadot unfolds for us the philosophical context of the Meditations, commenting on the philosophers Marcus Aurelius read and giving special attention to the teachings of Epictetus, whose disciple he was.The soul, the guiding principle within us, is in Marcus Aurelius’s Stoic philosophy an inviolable stronghold of freedom, the “inner citadel.” This spirited and engaging study of his thought offers a fresh picture of the fascinating philosopher-emperor, a fuller understanding of the tradition and doctrines of Stoicism, and rich insight on the culture of the Roman empire in the second century. Pierre Hadot has been working on Marcus Aurelius for more than twenty years; in this book he distills his analysis and conclusions with extraordinary lucidity for the general reader.

Winner of the Bruno Kreisky Prize, Karl Renner InstitutA Financial Times Best Economics Book of the YearAn Economist Best Book of the YearA Livemint Best Book of the YearOne of the world’s leading economists of inequality, Branko Milanovic presents a bold new account of the dynamics that drive inequality on a global scale. Drawing on vast data sets and cutting-edge research, he explains the benign and malign forces that make inequality rise and fall within and among nations. He also reveals who has been helped the most by globalization, who has been held back, and what policies might tilt the balance toward economic justice.“The data [Milanovic] provides offer a clearer picture of great economic puzzles, and his bold theorizing chips away at tired economic orthodoxies.”—The Economist“Milanovic has written an outstanding book…Informative, wide-ranging, scholarly, imaginative and commendably brief. As you would expect from one of the world’s leading experts on this topic, Milanovic has added significantly to important recent works by Thomas Piketty, Anthony Atkinson and François Bourguignon…Ever-rising inequality looks a highly unlikely combination with any genuine democracy. It is to the credit of Milanovic’s book that it brings out these dangers so clearly, along with the important global successes of the past few decades.—Martin Wolf, Financial Times

Bruno Latour has written a unique and wonderful tale of a technological dream gone wrong. The story of the birth and death of Aramis—the guided-transportation system intended for Paris—is told in this thought-provoking and fictional account by several different parties: an engineer and his professor; company executives and elected officials; a sociologist; and finally Aramis itself, who delivers a passionate plea on behalf of technological innovations that risk being abandoned by their makers. As the young engineer and professor follow Aramis’s trail—conducting interviews, analyzing documents, assessing the evidence—perspectives keep shifting: the truth is revealed as multilayered, unascertainable, comprising an array of possibilities worthy of Rashomon. This charming and profound book, part novel and part sociological study, is Latour at his thought-provoking best.

Hayek Book Prize FinalistAn Economist Best Book of the YearA Foreign Affairs Best Book of the YearA Financial Times Summer Reading Favorite“Sweeping, authoritative and—for the times—strikingly upbeat…The overall argument is compelling and…it carries a trace of Schumpeterian subversion.”—The Economist“[An] important book…Lucid, empirically grounded, wide-ranging, and well-argued.”—Martin Wolf, Financial Times“Offers…much needed insight into the sources of economic growth and the kinds of policies that will promote it…All in Washington would do well to read this volume carefully.”—Milton Ezrati, ForbesInequality is on the rise, growth stagnant, the environment in crisis. Covid seems to have exposed every crack in the system. We hear calls for radical change, but the answer is not to junk our economic system but to create a better form of capitalism.An ambitious reappraisal of the foundations of economic success that shows a fair and prosperous future is ours to make, The Power of Creative Destruction draws on cutting-edge theory and hard evidence to examine today’s most fundamental economic questions: what powers growth, competition, globalization, and middle-income traps; the roots of inequality and climate change; the impact of technology; and how to recover from economic shocks. We owe our modern standard of living to innovations enabled by free-market capitalism, it argues, but we also need state intervention—with checks and balances—to foster economic creativity, manage social disruption, and ensure that yesterday’s superstar innovators don’t pull the ladder up after them.

Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social construction, Ian Hacking reminds us. His book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality.Especially troublesome in this dispute is the status of the natural sciences, and this is where Hacking finds some of his most telling cases, from the conflict between biological and social approaches to mental illness to vying accounts of current research in sedimentary geology. He looks at the issue of child abuse—very much a reality, though the idea of child abuse is a social product. He also cautiously examines the ways in which advanced research on new weapons influences not the content but the form of science. In conclusion, Hacking comments on the “culture wars” in anthropology, in particular a spat between leading ethnographers over Hawaii and Captain Cook. Written with generosity and gentle wit by one of our most distinguished philosophers of science, this wise book brings a much needed measure of clarity to current arguments about the nature of knowledge.

An Economist Best Book of the YearA Financial Times Best Economics Book of the YearA Fast Company “7 Books Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Says You Need to Lead Smarter”Between 1820 and 1990, the share of world income going to today’s wealthy nations soared from twenty percent to almost seventy. Since then, that share has plummeted to where it was in 1900. As the renowned economist Richard Baldwin reveals, this reversal of fortune reflects a new age of globalization that is drastically different from the old. The nature of globalization has changed, but our thinking about it has not.Baldwin argues that the New Globalization is driven by knowledge crossing borders, not just goods. That is why its impact is more sudden, more individual, more unpredictable, and more uncontrollable than before—which presents developed nations with unprecedented challenges as they struggle to maintain reliable growth and social cohesion. It is the driving force behind what Baldwin calls “The Great Convergence,” as Asian economies catch up with the West.“In this brilliant book, Baldwin has succeeded in saying something both new and true about globalization.”—Martin Wolf, Financial Times“A very powerful description of the newest phase of globalization.”—Larry Summers, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury“An essential book for understanding how modern trade works via global supply chains. An antidote to the protectionist nonsense being peddled by some politicians today.”—The Economist“[An] indispensable guide to understanding how globalization has got us here and where it is likely to take us next.”—Alan Beattie, Financial Times

What is law? What is it for? How should judges decide novel cases when the statutes and earlier decisions provide no clear answer? Do judges make up new law in such cases, or is there some higher law in which they discover the correct answer? Must everyone always obey the law? If not, when is a citizen morally free to disobey?A renowned philosopher enters the debate surrounding these questions. Clearly and forcefully, Ronald Dworkin argues against the “ruling” theory in Anglo-American law—legal positivism and economic utilitarianism—and asserts that individuals have legal rights beyond those explicitly laid down and that they have political and moral rights against the state that are prior to the welfare of the majority.Mr. Dworkin criticizes in detail the legal positivists’ theory of legal rights, particularly H. L. A. Hart’s well-known version of it. He then develops a new theory of adjudication, and applies it to the central and politically important issue of cases in which the Supreme Court interprets and applies the Constitution. Through an analysis of John Rawls’s theory of justice, he argues that fundamental among political rights is the right of each individual to the equal respect and concern of those who govern him. He offers a theory of compliance with the law designed not simply to answer theoretical questions about civil disobedience, but to function as a guide for citizens and officials. Finally, Professor Dworkin considers the right to liberty, often thought to rival and even preempt the fundamental right to equality. He argues that distinct individual liberties do exist, but that they derive, not from some abstract right to liberty as such, but from the right to equal concern and respect itself. He thus denies that liberty and equality are conflicting ideals.Ronald Dworkin’s theory of law and the moral conception of individual rights that underlies it have already made him one of the most influential philosophers working in this area. This is the first publication of these ideas in book form.

What does it mean to be a hero? The ancient Greeks who gave us Achilles and Odysseus had a very different understanding of the term than we do today. Based on the legendary Harvard course that Gregory Nagy has taught for well over thirty years, The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours explores the roots of Western civilization and offers a masterclass in classical Greek literature. We meet the epic heroes of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, but Nagy also considers the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the songs of Sappho and Pindar, and the dialogues of Plato. Herodotus once said that to read Homer was to be a civilized person. To discover Nagy’s Homer is to be twice civilized.“Fascinating, often ingenious… A valuable synthesis of research finessed over thirty years.”—Times Literary Supplement“Nagy exuberantly reminds his readers that heroes—mortal strivers against fate, against monsters, and…against death itself—form the heart of Greek literature… [He brings] in every variation on the Greek hero, from the wily Theseus to the brawny Hercules to the ‘monolithic’ Achilles to the valiantly conflicted Oedipus.”—Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly

In 221 BC, the First Emperor of Qin unified the lands that would become the heart of a Chinese empire. Though forged by conquest, this vast domain depended for its political survival on a fundamental reshaping of Chinese culture. With this informative book, we are present at the creation of an ancient imperial order whose major features would endure for two millennia.The Qin and Han constitute the “classical period” of Chinese history—a role played by the Greeks and Romans in the West. Mark Edward Lewis highlights the key challenges faced by the court officials and scholars who set about governing an empire of such scale and diversity of peoples. He traces the drastic measures taken to transcend, without eliminating, these regional differences: the invention of the emperor as the divine embodiment of the state; the establishment of a common script for communication and a state-sponsored canon for the propagation of Confucian ideals; the flourishing of the great families, whose domination of local society rested on wealth, landholding, and elaborate kinship structures; the demilitarization of the interior; and the impact of non-Chinese warrior-nomads in setting the boundaries of an emerging Chinese identity.The first of a six-volume series on the history of imperial China, The Early Chinese Empires illuminates many formative events in China’s long history of imperialism—events whose residual influence can still be discerned today.

Every year hundreds of defendants are convicted on little more than the say-so of a fellow citizen. Although psychologists have suspected for decades that an eyewitness can be highly unreliable, new evidence leaves no doubt that juries vastly overestimate the credibility of eyewitness accounts. It is a problem that the courts have yet to solve or face squarely.In Eyewitness Testimony, Elizabeth Loftus makes the psychological case against the eyewitness. Beginning with the basics of eyewitness fallibility, such as poor viewing conditions, brief exposure, and stress, Loftus moves to more subtle factors, such as expectations, biases, and personal stereotypes, all of which can intervene to create erroneous reports. Loftus also shows that eyewitness memory is chronically inaccurate in surprising ways. An ingenious series of experiments reveals that memory can be radically altered by the way an eyewitness is questioned after the fact. New memories can be implanted and old ones unconsciously altered under interrogation.These results have important implications for court reform, police interrogation methods, defense strategy, and many other aspects of criminal and civil procedure. Eyewitness Testimony is a powerful book that should be required reading for trial lawyers, social psychologists, and anyone who considers the chilling prospect of confronting an eyewitness accusation in a court of law.

Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future.For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.

Intention is one of the masterworks of twentieth-century philosophy in English. First published in 1957, it has acquired the status of a modern philosophical classic. The book attempts to show in detail that the natural and widely accepted picture of what we mean by an intention gives rise to insoluble problems and must be abandoned. This is a welcome reprint of a book that continues to grow in importance.

A New York Times #1 BestsellerA Wall Street Journal #1 BestsellerA USA Today BestsellerA Sunday Times BestsellerA Guardian Best Book of the 21st CenturyWinner of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year AwardWinner of the British Academy MedalFinalist, National Book Critics Circle Award“It seems safe to say that Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the magnum opus of the French economist Thomas Piketty, will be the most important economics book of the year—and maybe of the decade.”—Paul Krugman, New York Times“The book aims to revolutionize the way people think about the economic history of the past two centuries. It may well manage the feat.”—The Economist“Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an intellectual tour de force, a triumph of economic history over the theoretical, mathematical modeling that has come to dominate the economics profession in recent years.”—Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post“Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book…In its scale and sweep it brings us back to the founders of political economy.”—Martin Wolf, Financial Times“A sweeping account of rising inequality…Piketty has written a book that nobody interested in a defining issue of our era can afford to ignore.”—John Cassidy, New Yorker“Stands a fair chance of becoming the most influential work of economics yet published in our young century. It is the most important study of inequality in over fifty years.”—Timothy Shenk, The Nation

A leading sociologist’s groundbreaking three-decade study challenges outdated views of crime and character, revealing that traditional risk factors alone poorly predict children’s futures.Between 1970 and 2020, the United States experienced a dramatic rise in crime and incarceration, followed by an unexpected decline. Along with plummeting violence came reductions in substance use, car accidents, child poverty, and lead exposure. By 2020, incarceration rates hit a twenty-five-year low, with African Americans benefiting the most. Yet these positive shifts have not registered in public discourse or policies, which continue to rely on outdated studies and reductive narratives of moral character and personal responsibility.A major reason for this oversight is how social scientists study youth development—typically through single-birth-cohort approaches that fail to capture generational change. In a pioneering three-decade study of over one thousand Chicago children across multiple cohorts, Robert J. Sampson challenges this convention. He finds that children with similar self-control and family backgrounds, born just a decade apart, experienced dramatically different life paths. Strikingly, children born in the mid-1980s faced twice the likelihood of arrest by their mid-twenties than those born ten years later.This research reframes deeply ingrained assumptions about ongoing social decline and the importance of individual fortitude. Sampson spotlights the role of shifting social conditions and structural change in driving measurable improvements in youth trajectories, along with new risks that threaten these gains.The era into which a child is born shapes their future as profoundly as race, upbringing, or neighborhood. To rethink progress, inequality, and policy, we must first acknowledge how time itself leaves a transformative mark on individual lives.